Program Information
Week 3 :: “Queer Shoulder to the Wheel” Lineage / Creative Activism / and an Allen Ginsberg Centenary
Week 3 Schedule
Workshops begin at 9:30 and end at noon.
Afternoon and evening events will be held in the Performing Arts Center on Naropa University’s Arapahoe Campus, unless otherwise noted.
Schedule is subject to change.
Monday, 6/15
1:00–2:30 PM :: Opening Panel ::
Panelists: Anne Waldman (chair);
3:00–4:00 PM :: MFA Lecture ::
Tuesday, 6/16
1:00–2:00 PM :: Artist Talk ::
2:30–3:30 PM ::
4:00–5:00 PM :: Artist Talk ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Wednesday, 6/17
1:00–3:00 PM :: Dharma Arts ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading :: Staff Reading
Thursday, 6/18
1:00–2:00 PM :: Panel :: Artist Talk ::
2:30–3:30 PM :: Artist Talk ::
4:30–5:30 PM :: Student Panel ::
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Friday, 6/19
1:00–2:30 PM :: Artist Talk ::
3:00–4:00 PM :: Colloquium
7:00–9:30 PM :: Student Reading
Saturday, 6/20
7:00–9:30 PM :: Faculty Reading ::
Workshop Faculty for Week 3
Tongo Eisen-Martin :: Workshop
Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker, educator, and poet who has organized around issues of human rights and self-determination for oppressed people throughout the United States. His curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, titled We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as a teaching and organizing tool throughout the country. His poems have been published in Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. His book someone’s dead already was nominated for a California Book Award. His book Heaven Is All Goodbyes was published in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and won the California Book Award and the American Book Award. His latest book Blood on the Fog was one of the New York Times poetry books of 2021. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. He was San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.
CAConrad :: Workshop
CAConrad has been writing poems for more than 50 years and working with (Soma)tic poetry rituals for over 20 years. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Literary Award. The Book of Frank is available in 9 different languages, most recently French and Italian. They also exhibit poems as sculpture with recent shows in London, Hamburg, Melbourne, Porto, Santander, and Tucson. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute and De Ateliers in Amsterdam. photo by Matthew Thompson Please visit them online at https://CAConrad.com
Cedar Sigo :: Workshop
Cedar Sigo is a poet and member of the Suquamish Nation. He studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of endless books and pamphlets of poetry, including All This Time (Wave Books, 2021), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently Siren of Atlantis (Wave Books, 2025). In 2022 he received a grants to artist’s award from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has taught all over the country including The University of Washington, Bard College, Washington University, Naropa University and The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.
Caroline Bergvall :: Workshop
Caroline Bergvall is an award-winning poet and interdisciplinary artist of French-Norwegian origins based in London. She works across media, forms and languages. Her work includes performances, books, installations, soundworks, drawings. Often works collaboratively. The recipient of many international commissions and fellowships Caroline is an exponent of writing and performance methods adapted to contemporary literacies. Noted works: books/projects Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014), sunrise performance Ragadawn (2018-). As a facilitator, she leads projects, runs workshops and provides individual mentoring with a special focus on queer, cross-cultural and multilingual contexts. Currently Global Professor Fellow, Queen Mary University, London.
Vincent Katz :: Workshop
Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and critic. He is the author of the poetry collections Daffodil (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025), Broadway for Paul (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), Southness (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2016), and Swimming Home (Nightboat Books, 2015), among others. He collaborated with Anne Waldman on the book-length poem Fantastic Caryatids (BlazeVOX Press, 2017) and with Andrei Codrescu on A Possible Epic of Care (Black Widow Press, 2023). Katz is the author of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton University Press, 2004), translations of the Roman love poet, which won the 2005 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. His translations of the Works and Days and Theogony of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod are forthcoming from David Zwirner Books’ ekphrasis series. Katz is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, and he curated an exhibition on Black Mountain for the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. His most recent book is Accounts, a collaboration with painter Richard Bosman. He is currently working on a memoir about Edwin Denby, Rudy Burckhardt and Yvonne Jacquette and the circles of artists they knew and collaborated with. His writing on contemporary art and poetry has been published widely. He lives in New York City.
Dharma Art :: TBA
[Description forthcoming.]
MFA Lecturer :: TBA
[Description forthcoming.]
Special Guest :: Steven Taylor
Steven Taylor collaborated with Allen Ginsberg for twenty years, and has composed music and songs for film, theater, dance, records, and radio. In 1984, he joined Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg in reforming their seminal underground rock band the Fugs. From 1988 to 1993, he worked with the New York hardcore band False Prophets, and in 2004 published False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground (Wesleyan UP). From 1995 until 2008, he was on the full time faculty at Naropa. Recent works include Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg (Three Rooms Press, 2018) Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Ace Records, 2019), the Fugs’ album Dancing In the Universe (2023). An essay entitled “First Blues: Music in the Life and Work of Allen Ginsberg” is to be included in a forthcoming anthology from Cambridge UP.
Special Guest :: TBA
[Description forthcoming.]
Harry Smith Recording Studio
Summer Writing Program participants (in select workshops each week) may have the opportunity to work in Naropa University’s Recording Studio. Sometimes the projects entail setting their work to music, or recording spoken word poetry, or recording their own poetic songs; oftentimes the recording studio projects are group collaborations, collective sound installations, and other experiments with the phonotext. Over the year Fast Speaking Music has produced several audio anthologies of student and guest faculty’s recorded work; the Harry’s House cd compilations; here is the link to Volume III: https://spoti.fi/3v19mQP
Ambrose Bye is a musician, engineer, and producer living in Mexico City, and is the co-founder of Fast Speaking Music with Anne Waldman. He has produced over 20 albums and frequently collaborates with poets. Recent productions include “Among the Poetry Stricken” (Clark Coolidge and Thurston Moore) and “Artificial Happiness Button” (Heroes are Gang Leaders). He has worked and performed at Masnaa and the Ecole de la Literature in Casablanca, Le Maison de Poesie in Paris, the fieEstival Maelstrom in Brussels, the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Pathway to Paris at Montreal POP 2015, and Casa Del Lago in Mexico City. He has also been involved in the recording studio and workshops at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University since 2009.
Fast Speaking Music
